Then Clover’s humor took exactly the sort of turn that her father had warned against. She began to wield her own “weapon” by mocking the English. “I like Englishmen,” she intoned to her friend, “when they are not lords and not affected and have not their money or their county position on their minds. What my friend Sir John Clark calls ‘the insolence of the British aristocracy’ irritates me.” Then Clover’s mockery grew more pointed. “I have a yearning in my heart that Mr. Fell shall turn out to be a widow with four plain daughters—to see you bossing a brood of pious little English girls, wrestling with their catechism and hereditary traits would give me lifelong joy.” She added, “I also assume that your new charge is poor because rich Englishmen marry only heiresses.” As Anne moved toward a new life of her own, Clover conjured up a poisonous scenario of motherless, plain-looking girls, a ghostly copy of her own childhood. In the haunted weeks of late April 1885, all she could see and feel was that Anne’s impending marriage would be for her yet another unbearable loss. Anne’s response to Clover’s letter is not known. Perhaps she took it in stride, perhaps not. In either case, Clover never again wrote Anne a letter.
Losing her father had deeply unsettled Clover. Fatigue and fear began to develop into something that simple rest could not remedy. Henry was watchful and patient, though distant. He did what he could to contain his wife’s sorrow, hoping her grief would blow past like a strong wind, as had her confusion on the Nile. But he was also worried about Clover. By early June, he postponed their western trip until August, telling a friend that it was “on account of the flies and gnats” that infested the western mountains in midsummer. His excuse gave discreet cover to the fact that Clover was not recovering.
Instead, Clover and Henry spent the early part of the summer of 1885 exploring the Virginia countryside and taking the water cure, a therapy popular since the middle of the nineteenth century, which emphasized moderate exercise, healthy foods, time spent outdoors, and numerous baths in mineral waters. On June 11, with their two saddle horses packed into a railroad car, Clover and Henry traveled southwest by train 250 miles to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the historic summer spa for antebellum plantation owners and their families, located on the eastern edge of the Allegheny Mountains. The sloping valley was ringed by misty, low mountains, with high oaks and lush vegetation. It was, as Henry remarked, “a country less known to Bostonians than could be found in Europe.” They bathed in the mineral pool, long famed for its curative powers, and they rode out by horseback to take in the views, particularly the riot of early-summer flowers. The “flaming yellow, orange, and red azalea” and “masses of white and pink laurel,” Henry remarked to a friend, made the landscape seem “like the most beautiful Appenines.” Henry’s language—his descriptions of flowering plants—echoes Clover’s in her many letters to her father.
The accommodations, however, were “so ideally bad” that four days later they rode seventeen miles farther south to another prominent resort, Old Sweet Springs, located in Monroe Country on the Virginia border. “Old Sweet” was a vast improvement. There the Adamses rented a small white wooden cabin, with a front porch the length of the house, that was comfortably shaded by a giant oak tree. When the southern heat became unbearable, they hiked over to the nearby bathing pool, which was kept a relatively cool seventy-six degrees. They spent their days swimming, reading, riding, and going for meals at the large red-brick hotel reputedly designed by Thomas Jefferson. Clover’s recovery was their primary aim. Though the resort had few visitors so early in the season, Clover and Henry had company: shortly after their arrival, their Washington friend Rebecca Dodge and her cousin, Cliff Richardson, the photographer who had introduced Clover to the newest developing processes at the National Museum eighteen months before, came by the early-morning train to stay with them.
Clover had taken along her camera and equipment, and after a season of not taking any photographs, she again turned her surroundings into pictures. Eight photographs from the Virginia trip are included in Clover’s third and last photograph album, which contains eighteen images. The first three photographs depict Henry, Rebecca Dodge, and Richardson, lounging on the front porch of their white clapboard cottage, the heat of the southern sun all but palpable in the grainy images. The first print includes all three figures, while the next two portray only Henry and Cliff Richardson. The figures take up different positions—in the first, all are seated; in the second, one is seated, one is standing; and in the third, two are seated. Though Henry is identifiable, in his usual light-colored summer suit, no one’s face is clearly visible because Clover put her camera at a farther remove than was typical for her. At this point, she seems less interested in portraits than in context. The giant oak tree hovering over the porch, the surrounding vegetation, the way the house sat on the land—Clover was paying attention to all of this. She captured the details of the Virginia countryside, a landscape that still bore the marks of battle and dislocation twenty years after the end of the Civil War.
Old Sweet Springs lies on the border between West Virginia and Virginia, between the Alleghenies to the west and the Shenandoah Valley to the east. Two years before, in the spring of 1883, Clover had arranged her horseback tour of the Shenandoah Valley, what had been the breadbasket of the Confederacy, with Henry and others, including Lucy Frelinghuysen, James Lowndes, and the von Eisendeckers. She had written to her father that the sight of “the ruins of a stone house or mill remind us that we were among the old battle fields and in the valley which Sheridan ploughed so deeply.” Clover was referring to General Philip Sheridan’s scorched-earth campaign of September 1864, which rendered the fertile farmland useless to the Confederates. Of course, other key battles of the war had taken place in this area and the surrounding region: Stonewall Jackson’s outsmarting of the Union army in the spring of 1862, which allowed him to retake the valley; the brutal Wilderness Campaign of May 1864, in central Virginia; and the climactic battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864. During the war almost no other region sustained as much damage—to plantations, crops, houses, railroads, schools, mills, and businesses—as did Virginia. Twenty years after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Virginia’s economy was still struggling.
Clover knew this history well. She had lived through it as a young woman, obsessively following Union troop movements and battle reports in Boston and New York newspapers, and she had lost several friends in the war, including her cousin Robert Shaw at Fort Wagner near Charleston and Charley Lowell at Cedar Creek. Clover and Henry also had entertained many of the central participants of the war at their table, Union and Confederate generals alike.
Now, with her camera in hand, Clover recorded a landscape still haunted by the effects of war, focusing specifically on one Virginia farm and the man and wife who lived there. She took her first image at a distance, in order to get into frame the entire battered log structure, which combined living quarters on one side and a barn on the other. Chickens peck at feed in the yard, and a woman stands in the doorway of the house, with a crude apron tied around her waist. The downstairs window has a curtain across it, but the upstairs window has been boarded over with rough-cut lumber. The old man, his white hair clearly visible, stands in the large doorway leading to the barn, leaning on a piece of farm equipment. Both stare intently and directly into Clover’s camera. The next photograph is similar, only this time the man and woman stand close together in the doorway of the house. The woman is barely visible behind her straight-standing husband, who holds one arm cocked on his hip. Though the image evokes the defeat of the South, it is also a vision of unbowed determination and self-sufficiency in the face of poverty, not unlike Dorothea Lange’s much later documentation of the refugees of the Great Depression.
It’s not clear when Clover developed these negatives, made the prints, and pasted them into her third red-leather album. By the summer of 1885, she was, of course, no longer writing letters to her father; much of what is known about her practice of photography was
recorded in the pages that she had penned every week, until now. Nor did she leave any notes about making these prints. The sequence of images, so carefully considered in the two prior albums, is more haphazard in the third. There are several empty pages, and a number of close-up portraits made at an earlier time, including her portrait of John La Farge. Also, the third album differs from the previous two in that Clover didn’t write her name in the frontispiece or provide captions for the prints. Instead, at the time or perhaps much later, Henry carefully wrote captions for most of the images in his meticulous handwriting, something he’d done only rarely in Clover’s previous albums. “Old Sweet Springs, Virginia, June 1885, Rebecca Dodge, Cliff Richardson, H. A.,” Henry wrote, and “Virginia farm-house, Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885.”
But disjointed as it is, with its gaps and silences, the third album nonetheless suggests a narrative, a theme: youthful promise fallen into irreparable decline. It opens not with the trip to Old Sweet Springs, but with photographs taken earlier of Falmouth, Virginia, just north of Fredericksburg, near the Spotsylvania battleground. A young girl, “Miss Hayward,” stands in front of a towering field of corn, dressed fashionably, wearing a straw bonnet and holding in her arms a small striped kitten. She is full of promise. But the mood quickly changes. In the next image, also taken at Falmouth, a young boy and his dog can’t stand still in front of Clover’s camera. They are a blur of movement, but behind them looms an old brick windmill, its severely damaged white wooden sails clearly visible. The windmill, in its uselessness and disrepair, is the focal point of the image, not the boy and his dog.
Following this are four photographs of broken-down houses near Bladensburg, Maryland, a town seven miles from Washington, where the Army of the Potomac had once bivouacked. Clover and Henry liked to ride there on horseback often, following military lanes and crosscuts marked out on an old army map that a retired Union general had given them. At some point, though she didn’t indicate when, Clover must have taken her camera along. Placed after these earlier Bladensburg images, showing abandoned Confederate homes with broken panes of glass and overgrown vines, are the later vacation photographs of Old Sweet Springs as well as two images of Rebecca Dodge standing alone in a field of tall grass, in profile and looking down, a sequence that creates a pervading tone of gloom. A broken-down windmill, abandoned houses, a vacation cabin dwarfed by surrounding vegetation, a solitary woman, and an ancient overgrown farm—all these images, though formally rigorous like her earlier photographs, are also sadder, a signal of defeat, and full of wreckage.
During their six-week sojourn in the South, Clover and Henry took long horseback rides in the countryside, following old trails and mountain turnpikes. Henry hoped that this form of recreation, a favorite of Clover’s, amid gorgeous scenery, would be enough to revive her. It had always done so in the past. But he began to suspect that this time it wouldn’t be enough, that he couldn’t do enough, that a separation had grown between him and Clover that was becoming darker, more sinister. A bleak feeling began to enter his letters. Once, while near White Sulphur Springs, as Henry described to Charles Gaskell, “we got a long way into the wild mountains by a rough path; and the groves of huge rhododendron were so gloomy and seemed to shake their dark fingers so threateningly over our heads, that we turned about and fled for fear night should catch us, and we should never be seen any more by our dear enemies who would like to have us lost in the woods.”
Clover and Henry were, of course, already lost in the woods.
CHAPTER 21
A Dark Room
IN MID-JULY of 1885, Henry Adams received a worried note from John Hay, asking, “Whither have you vanished? I shoot this inquiry into the vague of space?” Henry replied on July 17 from Beverly Farms. They’d had “a month of rambling,” he explained, and currently “various domestic necessities have forced us to return home and abandon our Yellowstone adventure.” Henry resisted spelling out their circumstances more clearly to Hay, one of his and Clover’s closest friends. He didn’t mention his wife; he didn’t say that she was by now slipping into a dangerous depression. At the end of July, Clover received a long letter from her cousin Sturgis Bigelow, Susan Sturgis Bigelow’s only child, who’d been living in Japan since 1882. He confided to Clover that his “private opinion” was that “you and Henry have not got enough enterprise” and, not knowing how serious her condition had become, asked her, “Why in the—never mind what—did you not come out here this summer?” He brightly insisted that she “just do it next year, without fail.”
Though Clover had dreaded going to their summer home, thinking it would be, as Henry told Charles Gaskell, “a gloomy spot,” she now secluded herself at Pitch Pine Hill. Her family surrounded her: Ned Hooper was on the North Shore with his five lively daughters for much of the summer, as were Ellen and Whitman Gurney. Most crucially, Beverly Farms provided much-longed-for privacy. It was a far better option than what Clover must have feared most—the humiliation of being hospitalized at McLean Asylum near Boston, in Somerville.
Clover did not delve much into the subject of madness. At times, she could be solicitous toward those afflicted by mental suffering. She was desperately worried about her childhood friend Adie Bigelow when, in 1882, she broke down. In a series of letters to her father, Clover explained that she knew from Adie’s “own lips her horror of insane persons, and of those who have been sent to asylums,” begging him to urge the family to send her instead for recovery to a “softer, milder climate,” adding, “You can do much with that family. They will take your advice.” When she heard of Adie’s admission to McLean Asylum a week later, she lamented, “I cannot bear to think that what we feared most has come to pass.”
Regarding other cases, Clover kept up on the gossip and sometimes, in her father’s opinion, displayed a “taste for horrors,” an unbecoming schadenfreude, an almost gleeful interest in the illnesses and mental breakdowns of others. She looked upon insanity with a kind of spooked curiosity combined with eagerness to stay away from it, as if protecting herself from something that might be contagious. “The insane asylum,” she mused to her father, “seems to be the goal of every good and conscientious Bostonian—babies and insanity the two leading topics of interest—Mrs. so and so has a baby—she becomes insane and goes to Somerville—baby grows up and promptly returns to Somerville—it’s all nonsense.” Uneasy dread lay at the heart of this humorous dismissal of the subject. Now, in the summer of 1885, Clover was in the midst of the very thing she had feared, and bluster no longer protected her.
There is little record of what Clover did from late July through mid-October of 1885. She tried to keep up a semblance of her usual routine, and one can imagine her walking in the nearby woods to find flowers, going for a horseback ride at the seashore, and swimming in the sea. Perhaps she felt as she had while on the Nile—“blind and deaf and dumb.” But whatever she did, nothing seemed capable of easing her mind—not Henry, her family, her friends, her garden, her dogs, her horses. At one point, she managed to reach out to Rebecca Dodge, who was dutifully taking care of an ill mother. “Dearest Rebecca,” Clover wrote, “you seem to have heavy burdens to bear but you are so sweet and brave and strong that you never seem to lose courage.” As she felt herself slipping farther and farther out of reach, Clover admired Rebecca’s courage the way a person who is drowning envies a strong swimmer capable of reaching shore.
Clover’s depression was unrelenting. She lost her appetite and could not sleep. Whitman Gurney told E. L. Godkin that his sister-in-law was suffering “in the gloomiest state of mind, and the gloom has not yet lifted.” Gurney surmised that “time seems the only remedy,” adding that Clover’s “general depression has been accompanied by the greatest sweetness towards us.” Ellen agreed, telling a friend how her sister had apologized repeatedly to her family for “every reckless word or act—wholly forgotten by all save her.” Few had suspected that beneath her wit and quickness, Clover had, over the years, carefully preserved a guilty tally of al
l her misdemeanors. Shame alternated with a descending fog of unreality. Robbed of her protective humor, she grew disoriented, pleading with her sister again and again, “Ellen, I’m not real—Oh make me real—you are all of you real!”
There were treatments Clover might have tried. Dr. George Beard, who made the first diagnosis of neurasthenia in 1869, had had success in curing depression with electrotherapy. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was renowned for his ability to make well “all the dilapidated Bostonians,” according to Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church, and prescribed with some success his rest cure, a strict regimen of bed rest, fatty foods, and retreat from everyday activities. Clover had met Dr. Mitchell when the famous nerve doctor had stopped in at H Street for tea the year before, and she’d found him fascinating, “very bright and full of talk.” She had access to the very best physicians in both Boston and Washington. Even so, if she or Henry or any other member of the family consulted with a doctor about what was happening to her during these months, they left no evidence of having done so. Nervous troubles and mental instability were often a source of enormous shame and could be damaging socially. It was often thought that such difficulties pointed to moral lapses or a family’s bad stock, and mental illness surely fed the gossip mill. For those surrounding Clover, the safest route was to wait out Clover’s despondency, with the hope that a modified version of rest and seclusion would eventually bring her back to life.
In the darkening days of mid-October, Clover and Henry left Beverly Farms for Washington, where she retreated into almost complete isolation at 1607 H Street, leaving her upstairs rooms only for an occasional carriage ride with Rebecca Dodge through the familiar streets of Washington, a city Clover used to relish in the autumn weather. But not this year. Rebecca remembered that during these outings, Clover would talk for a while, then stop abruptly, rubbing her forehead as if she had forgotten something, as if she was trying to put her thoughts back in order.
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